In which a pilot and author inflicts her opinions on the world….

Category Archives: Life

I’m tired and stressed and getting close to finishing all the ratings I need to actually start looking for a flying job and huge changes in my life and with my Grandma’s passing still fairly fresh, it’s got me thinking about the past. So you get another random story – probably the most entertaining story about me dating my current husband.

I had just met my husband, and it was either the first or second time I had him over to my place – I was living with my dad at the time. Anyway, I went downstairs for something, and he followed me.

My brother and I both had the Nerf bow and arrow, from way back when we were kids – we used to play a game where one person would try and dodge the arrows while the other fired them. We picked it up from step cousins.

But for some reason, I was twenty-two and the Nerf bow was laying out on the floor and my husband found it while I was getting whatever I was getting. I came out to him aiming it at me and firing off the three arrows as fast as he could re-load.

I ran into the storage room while he retrieved his arrows. He was blocking my path to the second bow, but this was my house. This was my turf, the house I knew like the back of my hand. And as he came around the door to the storage room with a freshly loaded Nerf bow and arrow, there was something he didn’t know.

What he didn’t know was the storage room was where we kept the Nerf Gatling gun.

Six arrows. No waiting.

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I haven’t posted anything about Autism Awareness Month so far (largely because the awareness thing isn’t going to make autistic peoples’ lives better without acceptance and understanding) but this topic has come up a fair bit lately in various articles.

First a definition: Person first language means using language that emphasizes that a person with a disability is a person, afflicted with a thing. Some people prefer this way of talking about autism because they don’t like the idea of emphasizing a label, so they say “person with autism.”

Identity first language is language that embraces the label as a part of a person’s identity. Some people prefer this way of talking about autism because it emphasizes that autism is a part of who they are and that they accept themselves as they are, so they say “autistic” or “aspie.”

If you start looking at the conversations going on on the internet, you’ll see a pattern in who prefers person first and who prefers identity first language. The parents of autistic children prefer person first language, because it allows them to say things like “I love you, but I hate your autism,” and lets them love their child without accepting their child for what they are.

Autistic people themselves for the most part prefer identity first language. They want to be able to take pride in who they are. And they want to encourage the world to understand them and accept them.

And another thing I’d like to touch on is parents who know their child has been diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder, but don’t tell their child, because they don’t want their child to be labelled. If you take away words, you make it impossible to talk about something. Imagine you’re trying to tell someone you need something to drink, but you have no word for “water” or “thirsty”.

I’ve never understood this fear of “labels” that everyone talks about. I’m not a person who’s married. I’m not a person who writes novels, or a person who flies aeroplanes. I’m a wife, a writer, a pilot. The only time a label becomes frightening is when it’s considered innately negative and shameful. No one fusses over a war vet being referred to as an amputee, and that’s because people don’t think being an amputee is shameful or that an amputee needs to be separated from their disability.

And Autistic people should not have to separate themselves from their diagnosis in order to be worthy of love, respect and understanding.

This event shall henceforth be known as the Great Hard Drive Failure of 2015 (the year that everything I possess that could break, broke.)

I like having my blog be around so I can look back at things that happened years later, like one would a journal, only public, so while this has very little to do with writing or flying, enjoy it as a little offering of non-fiction.

I came home one day, about a month ago, to find my computer showing a black screen. I moved the mouse to wake it up – nothing happened. Nothing I did made anything happen. Rebooted. Tried booting in safe mode. wtf. Nothing. Finally a went to my husband’s computer and started googling, figured out how to get to the bios, and hopped in there to poke around. I could see the hard drive, but I couldn’t tell it to boot from it.

This is literally the first time I’ve needed help to fix my own computer. I do tech support for a living, 7.5 hours a day, five days a week, for the last 10 years, and I’ve kind of got a handle on most things, though if something takes me more than 20 minutes to fix, I want to throw the computer out the window, because after 7.5 hours of fixing computers at work, I expect my frelling computer at home to work.

There are levels of techie people. People who aren’t techies don’t know this, but there are many levels and specialties, and I accept that I am a relatively low level techie person. I can fix a lot of things, but I have no formal schooling on it, and as far as coding, I know a couple of HTML commands but I wouldn’t know Perl from Shell or Java.

My best friend is somewhat higher level techie than me – she knows lots of more back-end stuff and coding, and has installed linux on one of her computers and knows her way around it. She got me set up with a flash drive to boot the computer into Linux from the usb flash drive. Then her roommate, who is even higher level techie, ran some diagnostics which confirmed my suspicion that it was the hard drive. And there was no repairing that – it’s pretty much the most nuclear thing that can happen to your computer. It’s that thing that can mean you’ve lost everything that’s not backed up on another device. And mine’s a solid state hard drive, which means you can’t just isolate the damaged sectors like you can with a traditional hard drive.

But the friend’s roommate ran a recovery tool – a good one apparently, and managed to make an image of my hard drive and save it on an external drive, recovering all but 4 kilobytes of data. Which, who knows what that will affect if the image is booted, but 4 kilobytes is a miniscule amount of data, so the recovered image is promising.

Next is getting a new hard drive…

So, my laptop is a snazzy-ass ultra-slim Asus zen-book. It is nice. I like it. It’s my favourite and most valuable physical possession. When I take it with me to write-outs, Rob Sawyer tells me how nice it is, like, every time.

It also has a proprietary eighteen pin connector for the hard drive. I bought it when solid state hard drives were a new thing, and while it runs very fast and pulls up programs that chug on many desktops instantly, it was before these things were really standardized, and only two models of hard drive were ever made to fit my computer. Both are no bigger than what I already had either, which was 128GB. Yes, I’ve been managing with 128GB of hard drive space on my only computer for the last 3 years. I can have one game installed at a time.

We researched options. There exists an M.2 adapter, which will allow me to install a more modern hard drive – possibly even a bigger one. There were reports of the new hard drive making it difficult to properly close the bottom cover after installing it, but people suggested filing the cover or cutting a hole in the bottom for it. Meh – cross that bridge when I get to it. The adapter was 13$. If it doesn’t work for me, it doesn’t work.

I called Memory Express. That’s the shop of choice for techies in the ‘Peg. They have people who actually know what they’re doing there, to fix computers instead of the trained monkeys at the geek squad who just tell you you bought a lousy computer and wipe your hard drive and reinstall windows. They also don’t talk to me like my ladybrain can’t handle their tech knowledge.

I explained what had happened, and the sales person (note – sales person, not the tech guys at the back) assured me they’d have a hard drive in stock that would fit my computer, that solid state hard drives weren’t a big deal anymore and were very common, no problem, just bring the laptop down and we’ll get you set up. I expressed some doubt that they would have the adapter I needed, but he was pretty confident they’d have what I needed. I brought the computer in.

The guy at the back did a minute and a half of checking and confirmed what I suspected – they didn’t have the adapter in stock – it wasn’t common, and they didn’t have a hard drive in stock that would fit the eighteen pin connector, and who told you we did, he’s going to yell at him.

So the choice is order another 128GB hard drive that I know works, or if I want a bigger hard drive (which I do) try my luck with the adapter, and then once it comes in, pick up the hard drive from Memory Express then.

I ordered the adapter, and it came in about a week. The adapter seems to fit in the computer fine. I head back to memory express and pick up a hard drive. 500GB. It wasn’t the brand they’d told me to buy earlier, but the sales person assured me it would work.

I need to stop talking to the sales guys. I get it home, and install it, and the computer won’t even boot linux now or go tinto the BIOS now, let alone recognize the new hard drive. I look a the package and slowly realize that there’s nothing on there that says it supports SATA. I bring it back.

No trouble returning it – I went to the guys at the back this time, who again promised to bitch out the sales guy who sold me the drive. The one they had originally said I should get (sadly only available in 240GB) is out of stock. They will order it in. I get a call the next day that it’s on backorder.

The good news is there’s another brand available that they can order in for me, so we went that way. The will try and get a 500GB if possible.

Another week, and I get a call, that my hard drive is in. I go, I pick it up, I install it. The computer recognizes it. This is good. The next step is getting an operating system installed. I was dropping my friend off that evening, so I stopped in for instruction from her roommate on what to do with this image he made. We open up the computer, and he brings up a linux terminal to show me what to do when I get it home and starts typing jibberish, and I get the distinct impression he thinks I have a clue what to do with a Linux terminal. Lol.

Granted, that’s way cooler than guys who assume my ladybrain can’t handle things like this. He gave me a half hour crash course on Linux terminal commands. I was fairly confident I could manage to at least not make anything worse. Granted, I had an empty hard drive, he had a backup copy of the image on a second external hard drive, and the flash drive with Linux was easily reproducible if I accidentally erased it. There wasn’t a whole lot left for me to break. I got home and went to town.

After stumbling through getting errors that the directory doesn’t exist, I caught the roommate on facebook, and he coached me on using tab completion to deal with a directory name that had spaces in it. After that, I had it, and the process of copying the old image onto the new hard drive started. This was going to take a few hours. I left it over night.

Got up the next morning to a message saying the process was complete. I unplugged the external hard drive and the flash drive, and rebooted the computer for the moment of truth. Does that 4 kilobytes of unrecoverable data in the image render windows un-bootable, and I’m going to have to do a fresh install of windows, and lose anything I

And what happened next is what annoyed me most about the whole thing. At this point I’d been running my computer in Linux off the flash drive for a month, unable to save files, or use any of my normal programs. And the computer turns on. I get the windows splash screen. I log in. I have all my old icons on the screen. I open google chrome. It brings up all my tabs that I had open the last time I booted windows on the old hard drive. It auto-logs me into windows and facebook and everything. I open scrivener, and all my novels and stories are there, up to date.

And I’m like, you were gone for a month, not so much as a letter or a phone call, I was so worried, and now you waltz back in here AND ACT LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED!

It was just so anticlimactic, you know? I was all ready to have to deal with a fresh install of windows, but nope. All back, literally like nothing happened.

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When I first started flying, I was caught up in the excitement of making the decision and it being real, and then the question came up in the medical “Do you have a neurological disorder?” I hadn’t even thought about my Aspergers diagnosis being a problem, and no one who knew me would have suggested I wasn’t competent enough to learn to fly. I can’t pretend to say I know what my instructor thought when I told her there would be a delay and why, but she never let on that she thought any less of my abilities as a pilot because of it.

But at the time, I could find nothing at all on the internet to reassure me that it wouldn’t stand in my way of becoming a commercial pilot. So once that was all resolved, and I had a bit of a soapbox for winning the first to solo prize, I wrote an article for the Women of Aviation Week site, about my experiences with getting my medical, despite having a formal diagnosis of Aspergers Syndrome. I still get messages about it, from exactly the people I wrote it for. People with Aspergers who want to learn to fly but are afraid of discrimination because of their diagnosis.

Aspergers seems to be the unsubstantiated disorder du jour to slap onto every white male serial killer and mass shooter, but all that really is is society trying to “other” the person who did bad. It’s easy if the bad guy is black or Muslim, or some obvious not-like-us, but when it’s a white male for some reason they have to come up with something to place him away from other “good” white males, to explain why he did it. But I’m sorry, being a serial killer or mass murderer doesn’t make someone an Aspie, it just makes them an asshole.

But the result is a deep misunderstanding on the part of general society about what Aspergers Syndrome actually is, and what it means, and that can lead to prejudice and discrimination.

But I still remember my Mom once telling me that maybe I shouldn’t tell people I have Aspergers. I’ve had other pilots tell me I should have lied so that I wouldn’t have to worry about the medical. And I’ve heard from other pilots who have withheld the fact that they have Aspergers, or just avoided getting a formal diagnosis to keep it from being a problem, because they were afraid of being discriminated against. I have even heard about a student who’s being refused training by an instructor who is uncomfortable with her diagnosis, because he doesn’t understand what effect it might have on her competence. As far as I’m aware, he may not even be willing to let her try. I’ve heard from Aspies who can’t get a simple driver’s license in the USA because in their overly litigious world, doctors won’t put themselves on the line to be sued in case that person were to get in an accident and be found not to be medically fit to drive.

The difficulties I do have are mostly in making friends, navigating friendships, being able to tell if someone actually likes me, or if they’re just being nice, or sometimes being able to tell if someone is teasing me or being serious. Noisy crowds and parties burn me out very quickly. Those are the main things I notice that cause me the most problems in my life.

How does that affect my flying? It really doesn’t. The closest has got to be getting along well with my instructor and not being able to tell if she actually enjoys my company as much as I enjoyed hers, or if she was just being nice because I was paying her. After two years I got my answer the day I finished my commercial license and she sent me a facebook friend request with a note saying she had a policy of not friending students on facebook until after she was finished training them.

There are no noisy crowds in the cockpit. Communication in aviation, between pilots and between ATC is very structured and clear. I have a good memory for rules and the million other things you have to remember and notice when flying a plane. It’s a place where the difficulties I have aren’t really relevant, and furthermore, a place that lets many of the strengths that come with being an Aspie shine through.

Which is not to say that every person with Aspergers is capable of learning to fly an aerplane. Some of the common symptoms of Aspergers is being sensitive to loud noises (I have trouble with crowds but some Aspies have issues with any loud noises) and the roaring engine might be an insurmountable problem. Some Aspies might have social anxiety bad enough they wouldn’t be able to communicate effectively on the radio. Another common symptom is poor motor skills, which could affect their ability to develop the stick-and-rudder skills needed to do the actual flying. Some may just have too much anxiety to remain composed in an emergency situation.

The thing is, if you’re met one Aspie, you’ve met one Aspie. Every one of us is different, with different symptoms and severities of symptoms, and strengths and weaknesses.

Almost like we’re actual people huh? Individuals, even. Not every Aspie is cut out to be a pilot. Not every neurotypical (nomal) person is cut out to be a pilot either. That’s something that would be determined based on performance during training, not based on a diagnosis, assuming the student is cleared on their medical.

I haven’t faced discrimination myself so far. The doctor who did my medical stated out loud that he didn’t feel that Aspergers was something that should prevent me from flying. Transport Canada asked for a letter from my family doctor – I’m not even sure what it was he wrote for them, but I’ve seen the guy like three times in my life, I swear, so he couldn’t really tell them any more than no, she’s not on any medications or requiring any counseling or other support – and they signed off on my medical certificate based on that. I don’t disagree with the way Transport Canada handled my case. They were prudent and fair, and they didn’t deny me my medical for no reason. As far as training, none of my instructors treated me any different than other students as far as I know. I’ve been pretty lucky so far. This is Canada.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t run into problems in the future. There are plenty of people out there who will think that I would be better off deleting this post and any record on the internet that I can erase that might tell a future employer googling my name that I’m an Aspie. They’ll say, well Transport Canada knows, you’re legal, you have no restrictions on your medical, you’re not obligated to tell your employers, why would you make it easy for them to find out if they’re likely to pass you up for jobs because of it?

One friend pointed out, well, why would I want to work for someone who would do that to me if they found out?

But it’s more than that. The way people think about Aspies won’t change if we keep hiding and pretending. I’m not saying that every person who’s hiding their diagnosis needs to come out, but the idea that I and others are afraid of how people will react and how we could be discriminated against due to it, makes me angry. So yeah, maybe there will be jobs I’ll miss out on because a prospective employer gets cold feet out of ignorance and misunderstanding and fear, but I feel like I have a responsibility to bullhead my way through that and show them how wrong they are. To paint a new picture for the world of what it means to be an Aspie, in the hopes of making it easier for those who come after me. It’s always an act of bravery to be one’s truest self.

Okay, so one of the first questions people ask when they want to know more about flight training is “Is it really as expensive as people say?”

And the answer is yes. Whatever you think you’re going to end up spending on it, it will probably cost twice that. Here’s a link to the rates at my school. And those are mostly the numbers based on the *minimum* number of hours required by Transport Canada. Most people will take longer than that to be ready for the test. Furthermore, between getting your private license and getting your commercial license, you have to get your Pilot in Command time up to a minimum 100 hours, and that’s not included in there either.

So, thinking about those statistics on how many people make it through flight training and how the majority don’t finish, I wondered how much of that is due to lack of funds. I bet it’s most of them. When I started, and word got around about what I was doing, suddenly there were people left and right telling me they’d done some flight training at one point. But then they ran out of money. Over and over I heard the same story. I’ve seen people on the internet in the throes of that running out of money stage, and it’s heartbreaking. I almost feel guilty for having been able to do it myself.

I suspect there’s some people who were surprised I made it this far, even though now they all say “I knew you could do it!” But the people who know me the best tell me they never had any doubt I could do it, and the only thing that really surprised them was that I managed to make it happen financially. I’m not someone who’s really good with money, but now that I’ve made it this far, I figure maybe I do have a few things to say on the subject with regards to flight training.

So here’s some straight talk about the realities of how much it costs to learn to fly.

The main thing I’d recommend, that I did do right, is making sure the money is there when you need it. You don’t want to be nearly ready for whatever level test, just need a few more hours of practice, and then run out of money. If that happens, then you’ll be out of practice by the time you get your hands on more money, and need more hours of practice before you’re ready again. Having a credit card with an amount of credit you never imagined you’d actually use is great for that. Lines of credit to pay off the credit card with cheaper interest rates are even better. I stress about money easily, and when the secretary at Harv’s would remind me I needed to top off my account, it made it so much easier to know I had my credit card in my wallet and could take care of it right there and worry about paying the bank later and focus on flying when I needed to.

Another consideration is whether or not to buy your own plane. I had a lot of people tell me that I should buy my own plane, that it would be cheaper in the long run. I think if you’re only planning on getting a private license that’s probably a valid argument. For myself, I didn’t, and I’m glad I didn’t, but not for financial reasons. On the one hand, I’d have been responsible for maintenance and airworthiness reports, hangar space, repairs, and I don’t know what else, all while trying to focus on learning to fly.

On the other hand, I’d have only learned to fly one plane. All through my private license, I flew about ten different Cessna 152’s. Some had climbing props, some had different types of radios and instrument styles, and sometimes the stall horn would go off if you looked at it the wrong way while another wouldn’t go off until you were fully stalled. Then I got my license and got checked out on the Cessna 172, and the Citabria. When I’m ready to go on to my Multi-IFR, the school has two Seminoles available for me to fly, and if I’d bought my own plane, it would have been a single engine and would have been useless for getting a multi-engine rating, even if I were lucky enough to find myself a plane with both a VOR and an ADF to work with on my IFR rating. So, I’d say, if you’re planning on just doing a private licence, go ahead and buy a plane. If you’re planning on going commercial, don’t bother.

What else to say…

Where to get the money? There’s a good question. Student loans doesn’t cover flight training. They don’t consider that legit post secondary training and you can’t get government student loans for it. Everyone will tell you to apply for scholarships, but there are actually very few, and almost none worth more than 1500$. Most of them are like, 200$-300$. I have not won any monetary scholarships. The big one I did win was the first to solo scholarship, and that was mostly schwag, plus a really fracking nice headset. Still totally worthwhile, even just for the headset, but it doesn’t go very far when it comes to avgas. I kind of have a dream of someday having enough money to fund a couple thousand dollar scholarship.

I was lucky. We had some money –about 25k–and my husband agreed to sign it over to me to follow my mad little dream. I think I probably spent about 15k on my private licence. I’m now finished my commercial licence and that money’s all gone, plus I’m about 15k in the red. I would have run dry of credit long before completing my CPL if I hadn’t had that money to start. If your flight school is on a certain list, you can qualify for a student line of credit, which is what I’ve got, but if you don’t own a house or a car worth more than a few thousand bucks, you have no collateral, and they can’t repossess your pilot’s licence so they’re hesitant to lend you a whole lot. I got a limit of 20 in the student line of credit, and another 10k in a second line of credit. My Dad was willing to co-sign for me, but turns out because he’s self employed, his signature didn’t actually help me, even though he’s the most financially stable person I know and could have paid for all my training out of pocket. I have also received a little over 10k between my Dad and my paternal Grandmother and other family members.

And that’s another thing. I have family I can turn to if things ever got really bad. I wouldn’t be on the street if the debt became overwhelming. If my Dad wasn’t as financially stable as he is, going into this much debt would be terrifying. Many people wouldn’t have had a job where their income would have allowed them to borrow as much as I have, and wouldn’t have the startup money to offset the debt. I’d love to be able to say, like many people do, if you want it, you just have to find a way to make it happen, look at me, I did. But I know there are tons of people out there who love flying who may never be able to follow their dream because they could never scrape together the resources necessary, and it’s not fair. I’ve been lucky.

So how much does it cost to learn to fly? The answer is all of it. All your monies. All gone. And some of the monies that belong to the bank too, as much as you can sucker them into lending you. All the monies you can sucker your family into giving you. If you discover you love flying, you will hemorrhage cash at rates you do not now think possible. There are always more ratings, more training, more time-building, more licenses to get, and if you love flying, you’ll just keep going until you have no more money. The numbers on checks and bank statements will start to seem surreal and loose real meaning. But if you’re going commercial like I was, unless you’re filthy rich, it’s really an all or nothing thing.

And yet, there has not been one single moment in all of this where I’ve thought to myself “I wish I hadn’t done this,” or “I don’t know if this was really worth it,” or “This didn’t turn out to be everything I hoped it would be.” It is everything I hoped it would be, and like the title says, I regret nothing.

I used to draw and paint when I was younger, and have a ton of art supplies that I haven’t touched in years. I spent a lot of money on them, and had them packed away in a tackle box to keep them organized.

I’ve been writing for the last 16 years, and that’s the art that stuck with me. From an early age, even my art was about telling a story, so it makes sense that I eventually found my true passion in writing. Since thn I’ve also become a pilot, which is only the most awesome thing in the world.

So I figured I’d put away my art supplies in a box, and used that lovely tackle box for office supplies.

You know how when you pull out something you once loved, and suddenly you want to get into it again? I was thinking, I’m gona go through this stuff and suddenly I’m gonna want to draw or paint something again.

And I went through my art supplies and thought, “Shit man, I’m never gonna use any of this shit ever again.”

There was a distinct lack of nostalgic feelings. Nothing. Like the art thing was just something to do, something to justify my existence, something I did to please the people around me and get that pat on the head I so desperately needed. The more I think about it, the more I think that’s what it is. I was decently good at it, having practiced, and anything I was decently good at, I’d do it more because it got me positive attention. I don’t think I really differentiated between enjoying an activity and enjoying the attention I got for doing it.

It’s kind of a weird revelation. The stereotype is the young girl passionate about art, chasing her dream of being a professional artist, drawing and painting for the love of art. I was good at drawing, so I embraced the role. That’s a thing about Aspies – they imitate. I can’t even help it. At least now that I’m older, and I know I’m an Aspie and have that tendency, I can consciously pick and choose who to imitate, and what roles to embrace. Like my flight instructor – I can adopt her attitudes towards aviation safety, and aspire to one day fly as well as her.

But painting, it seems maybe there wasn’t the passion there that I thought there was. There was a lot of encouragement – way more than the encouragement I got when I took up flying. But with flying, the passion is there. It’s different. Writing too – I couldn’t stop writing, even if there was no hope of anyone ever wanting to give me money for it.

Anyway, I’m gonna go finish dumping my art supplies into a bin and see if my roomie wants any of it before I see about donating it to a school or something.

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We’re moving, and it might be sooner than we’d planned, which is good, but stressful. Still, just as well to get things over with, if it’s going to happen. We found a place where we won’t have to hide the cats, and we just need to find out if we get approved, thanks to a friend who spotted the rental listing on facebook.

I’m putting off rewriting that one section of the commercial exam because there’s just too much going on right now to deal with it.

Women In Aviation Week: that happened, and it was big, exhausting day for this aspie. We had fifteen women interested in flying out at Lyncrest, though, with limited planes that had skis, we only managed to get a couple of them into the air. We had lots of time to chat though, which is cool, because my husband gets tired of listening to me talk about flying…

Four year old asks the tough questions: I was over at my critique partner’s house (she gets mad when I call her my BFF) and her nephew, who likes planes and has been told about me, asked “Are you really going to be a pilot?”

I said “I already am.” He seemed very confused. I assumed perhaps he didn’t understand what a pilot was, so I elaborated, “I fly a plane.”

He still looked confused, and finally he asked “If you have a plane, then why do you have a car?”

Valid question. I tried to explain that the roads weren’t really wide enough.

Writing: Been querying. There have been developments. I don’t see a lot of people talking about getting requests for full manuscripts, so I don’t know if that’s because it happens so infrequently, or if it’s because there’s some faux pas about saying when you’ve got an agent looking at your manuscript, but there have been developments. I am hopeful. Cross your fingers for me.